She needed a safe place. She got the most dangerous man in Chicago.
Wendy Callahan walked away from an eight-year teaching career to build something that was finally hers—a bookstore in Bridgeport with cramped shelves, loyal regulars, and a cat named Hemingway who rules the mystery section.
But when a fencing kingpin decides her back room is the perfect front for stolen merchandise, Wendy’s quiet life turns into a nightmare of break-ins, dead threats, and phone calls that describe her routine in terrifying detail.
Then he walks through her door.
Blizzard didn’t come to Callahan’s Books looking for a woman.
He came looking for an out-of-print military history.
But the bookstore owner with shaking hands and fierce eyes—the one sleeping in her store with a baseball bat because she’s too stubborn to run—changes something in him that’s been frozen since an Afghan mountain pass took two men and left him standing.
He’s the coldest enforcer the Windy City Wolves have ever patched in. He doesn’t feel the weather. He barely feels anything. But watching men circle her sanctuary like predators waiting for her to break thaws something he thought was dead.
What starts as surveillance becomes obsession.
Every visit, every silence they share, every moment her hostile cat climbs into his lap pulls him closer to a woman who sees past the ice and isn’t afraid of what’s underneath.
But Arthur has been running his operation for twenty years, and he’ll destroy everything Wendy built before he lets a bookstore owner tell him no.
Now Blizzard has a choice: stay frozen and watch her world burn... or unleash the cold on every man who ever threatened what’s his.
For a man who thrives in conditions that kill everyone else, it’s not a choice at all.
Her books. Her cat. His to protect. His to claim.
